


Away

by Viridian5



Category: Andromeda
Genre: Character of Color, Drama, Dylan's bad decisions, Episode Related, Humor, M/M, Missing Scene
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2003-06-11
Updated: 2003-06-11
Packaged: 2017-10-02 07:13:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,743
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3908
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Viridian5/pseuds/Viridian5
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>So far away, so close.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Away

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks to Riv for beta.
> 
> I know that I have an _Andromeda_ story titled "In the Falling Away," but "Away" felt too right for this one....
> 
> Spoilers for "Under the Night," "Its Hour Come 'Round at Last," "A Heart for Falsehood Framed," "The Shards of Rimni," "What Happens to a Rev Deferred?," "Vault of the Heavens," "The Illusion of Majesty," "Day of Judgement, Day of Wrath," and "Shadows Cast By a Final Salute."

"Harper, what's going on?" Dylan asked as everyone else cleared out of his office.

"What, boss?" Harper, impossibly, had more bounce than usual.

Dylan folded his hands on his desk and leaned forward. "You were staring at the Vase of Rimni through the whole briefing."

"Just thinking that someday you might admit that, while it has historical value, that vase just sits around looking ugly. Besides, I helped retrieve it, so it makes it part mine... in a totally non-owner way, of course."

"It _is_ ugly," Dylan had to admit.

"See? That little bit wasn't so hard. Soon enough you'll admit to all of it."

"I doubt that."

Harper tilted his head. "You got something on your mind?"

"What, that doesn't happen often?"

"Do you really want an answer to that?"

"I was going to apologize for some of the rougher moments of our Vase of Rimni--"

"Adventure? Debacle? Quest?"

"--thing." Still, it had been good to have Harper with him through that.

"Dylan, like I told you yesterday--several times, I might add--I was glad to be there. Haven't had that much fun in a while. I'm still buzzed. Though I'm still ticked off at being 'Monkey Boy.' I'm suave, dammit."

Dylan smiled as he asked, "Imprisonment, fights, and threats to your life are fun?"

"Under the right circumstances and with the right person, yeah. 'Sides, I've done some jail time with all of my buds. This just brings you deeper into the club."

"Your record is surprisingly clean."

"Hey! And you're looking at my record?" Harper looked almost... seductive. "It was unjust cause and unjust imprisonment a lot. Peril of being couriers sometimes."

"I'm curious about your public lewdness charge."

Harper colored a little. "Only the once!"

Dylan smiled at his vehemence. "Still."

"You get me drunk enough on some really good stuff, and maybe I'll tell you the details."

"I'm also curious about your fighting style." It had been... memorable. Though effective.

Harper shrugged. "I was taught by a wandering master, a breakdancing prostitute."

Dylan remembered the spins, the writhing and bouncing, the way Harper had wrapped his legs around that one assailant who'd held him up by the throat.... "Really?" You never could tell with Harper.

"Not really, but it sounds like fun, doesn't it?"

  


* * *

"Come," Dylan said.

Harper walked into Dylan's ready room already at full steam. "Hey, Dylan, thanks for saying that I have a good brain, but I'd like to go out on a mission again before I die of old age. I mean, you know I wanna. I'm pretty obvious. I wanted to help find Rev! Was that thing with the vase a few months ago just to toy with me?" Harper was being dramatic. Again.

"What about your trips down to Virgil 9 and Elba 9?"

"One trip each, and I'm only allowed to go down to planets that have a 9? That cuts things down."

"We couldn't risk you here."

"But the whole command crew goes down? If something went wrong, it'd be Captain Harper or Captain Gemini."

"Actually, command would then go to a member of the new High Guard crew."

"That is so not the point, and you know it!" Then Harper got a look on his face. "If everybody else died, I'd be expected to take orders from a newbie? I would be so gone."

"You would leave Andromeda?" Dylan couldn't believe it.

"I'd hate it, but can you see one of the High Guard newbies having any clue what to do with me? My loyalty is to you guys, not the High Guard. The Maru's legally mine if something happened to Beka, so I'd take it and leave."

Desperate times called for desperate measures. Dylan took a bottle of Scotch out from under his desk. Harper regarded it suspiciously and asked, "What's that for?"

"Celebrating Rev's health and happiness. And I remember you saying once that you'd talk about the public lewdness charge if I got you drunk on some good stuff."

"You think pouring Scotch in my mouth will stop me from complaining?"

"I hoped it would make you feel better. It's _very_ good Scotch."

Harper tried to keep his distance and look angry, but the lure of good Scotch brought him in close and made him sit down, as Dylan knew it would.

  


* * *

"Drunk yet?" Dylan asked.

Harper almost did a spit take. "Wow, I'm getting a whole new look into your psyche. And, no, I'm not drunk yet. My family would roll over in their shallow graves if they heard you drunk me under the table on only half a bottle of Scotch each."

Dylan squirmed a little on the inside. He hated when Harper threw Earth between them when he couldn't help anyone there, so he ignored it. "What will it take?"

"More than this. Maybe more than you got. If you want the story of my charge of public lewdness, it'll have to be the good stuff all the way, not you substituting cheap shit once you think I'm too tipsy to notice. Those are the terms."

"You don't trust me?"

"I didn't reach my current fine old age by trusting people, Dylan."

Harper kept doing it, but he was a bit soused and still angry over being left on the Andromeda, so Dylan let it go.

"You're ignoring me again," Harper said. "That's okay, though. I'm used to it. Shouldn't have to be, but I am. People don't ignore you, so you don't know what it's like."

"I'm not as omnipotent as you think I am."

"Didn't say you were. You just got this thing where other people think a lot of you. Like, we're both dogs, both of us."

"What?"

"Pretty woman walks by, you're on her too. Difference is, the chicks dig you, so you don't look desperate. Or at least not _as_ desperate. You put out a smarmy line or two, and it's liplock. Me, I'm squeezing out my whole barrage in a few seconds--verbally, since in all other ways I take my time, and you know what I mean--before the lady gets a chance to shoot me down. She does it a little later, but at least that way I get my bid out there."

Dylan would have been more upset if he'd believed anything Harper had said of him. "My lines aren't smarmy."

"Dylan, your lines are _so_ smarmy. Fortunately for you, thousands of years of evolution haven't made women any less likely to go for the tall guy over the short, cute guy."

"You get to drink my liquor _and_ insult me?"

"Yeah. Ain't it cool?" Harper leaned back in his chair and regarded Dylan with bright eyes. "But I can go if you don't like it. I'm already ahead by a bit of Scotch, and I didn't expect my visit to you to get any joy on the away missions front anyway."

Sometimes Dylan didn't understand Harper at all. "Then why did you make it?"

"For the moral high ground of being able to remind you that I told you what I think about it."

Dylan brought up another bottle of good Scotch and raised an eyebrow at him. Harper smiled, looking feral, and said, "That's the ticket."

  


* * *

"I am _not_ drunk," Harper said.

"You are too. You can barely sit upright," Dylan protested. He knew he was far from sober himself, and Harper's stubbornness seemed to be the height of unfairness.

Harper stood and teetered. "If I were drunk, I wouldn't be able to stand."

"Give it up. You promised."

"I said I'd tell if I were drunk. I'm not drunk, so no story." Harper kept teetering as he walked to the door.

He'd plied Harper with good Scotch unto drunkenness, as required, so he wanted the public lewdness story. "Welsher."

"_Irish_, thank you. And I'm still pissed at you over Rev, so...." Harper stuck his tongue at Dylan.

"I could give you something better to do with that tongue."

"But you never do, you tease."

Hunh?

"Thanks for the Scotch," Harper said as he leaned against the doorframe. "Try again some other time."

  


* * *

"Yeah, it's a miracle, all right. Tyr's sulking that you got to father an entire race." Harper swayed up and down on his toes a bit, then said, "I think the ice queen made the AP valve fail to bring us to her."

"That's crazy."

"As crazy as her thoughts calling a big 'wish you were here' across several systems?"

"Hmm."

"Yeah, hmm. The valve is automatic, and I know I maintain the AP system carefully. Yet it failed in just such a way to bring us--well, you--closer to Buri? Schyeah, pull the other one."

Dylan smiled. Harper in a good mood could light up a room. But that didn't mean he could let his engineer get away with anything. If you gave Harper a meter, he took a kilometer. "If this is you trying to make a plea for leniency on drag racing the Andromeda, it won't work."

Harper did his best innocent look. "It wouldn't have been bad at all if that valve hadn't ever so suspiciously failed. I had to uphold Andromeda's honor!"

"You had to try to score against Agio."

"That too. I multi-task." Harper spent a moment of silence watching Buri, then said, "Maybe I could interest them in a business venture. That was a nice, clean high they did, with no comedown afterward. If I can figure out how to do that without needing to export one of them to trigger it...."

"I don't think they'd be interested."

"'Cause they're so moral aside from how they call men to their moon, knock 'em out, and rape 'em?"

Dylan put his fingers against the bridge of his nose and pressed. Yet he had to admit that Harper had a point, as so often happened.

"Thanks for putting me on the away mission," Harper said.

"I still can't believe you asked if you could watch."

"Scientific curiosity! Nobody even knows these people exist, so seeing a mating would be a big thing."

"Scientific?"

"I'm a student of life, always about the knowledge." He grinned. "'Sides, it'd be hot."

Dylan didn't really know how to answer that. As he stood there struggling to find an answer, Harper's grin deepened. "I'll leave you to try to find a comeback. See ya, Dylan." He bounced/walked away with a bit of a strut.

Harper thought it would be hot?

  


* * *

"The emulators work well for ya?" Harper asked as he walked up alongside Dylan.

Having Tyr and treachery on his mind, Dylan didn't pay full attention and just kept walking, knowing Harper would walk along with him. "Yeah. Great invention."

"Pretty planet? From what I saw up here, it looked like Earth before all of space came knocking. Time of innocence and all."

Dylan saw this heading to a bad place. "It wasn't perfect."

"Wish I could have seen it in person, especially since I could have been useful down on the planet, king of anachronisms that I am. Useful since I monitored their communications and cultures to put your papers and cover stories and the emulators together, and useful since I ran scams for years before I even met Beka and got real good at bullshitting people when put on the spot. But I guess you have no idea how much I want to do away missions, since it's not like I tell you or anything."

"Harper--"

"Now that the Drago-fucking-Kazov have done First Contact and started establishing bases there, I doubt it'll be pretty there much longer. The Drago-Kazov we led there. But now that we got what we wanted, we don't care about what happens to the people, if we ever did to begin with. 'It's too late to do anything now, Mr. Harper,' right?" Harper shook his head and stalked off. "I'm glad we can have these little chats, Dylan."

Dylan shook his head. Harper couldn't even give up on him like a normal person would. Dylan often found Harper to be more alien than Trance.

  


* * *

Dylan watched Harper and Tyr walk together, approaching him. They always appeared to be hilariously mismatched: short, blond, and manic next to tall, dark, and contained. Tyr looked as deadly as he was, while Harper appeared to be harmless. They should have hated each another just from Harper's issues with Nietzscheans, yet they seemed to enjoy one another's company. The look Tyr turned on Harper was more than fond, while Harper....

Harper looked at Tyr with an expression that Dylan once remembered being a recipient of, a look he hadn't gotten in a long time. Dylan suddenly understood. How could he have been so blind?

How could he now miss something he hadn't even known he'd had?

He couldn't exactly blame Harper, given his long-term blindness and his past relationship with Rhade, but he hadn't expected it. Harper _hated_ Nietzscheans, even if he had become friends with Tyr. Yet this was more than friends.

"Admit it, Tyr," Harper said, grinning, "you liked having me in shackles."

"I hardly _had_ you in shackles," Tyr purred as he cupped the back of Harper's neck with one hand.

Harper purred back, "If you're really good, maybe we can fix that later."

"I'm always good."

"You'll have to prove it to me, big fella. At least once. Oh, hey, Dylan," Harper said with no self-consciousness whatsoever. "We out of the Prolon System yet?"

"Yeah," Dylan said, "and Tura's ship has turned around."

Harper shook his head. "I can't believe you actually fell for Tura or Lorina or Hajin Na or whatever her name actually is. You don't love a woman like that. You admire her chest, since she displays it so prominently, and maybe you sleep with her, though you'd be stupid to actually _sleep_ with her since she'd steal you blind, but you don't love her." Harper had been proud of Dylan over his handling of Tura until Dylan had admitted that he really had felt something for her.

"We feel how we feel."

"Yeah, really."

Tyr and Harper turned similar looks of near contempt on Dylan. It startled him.

"I enjoyed the field trip though," Harper continued. "It was fun being a judge for half a minute. Hey, catch up with you later, Tyr, Dylan. I have to see if I can salvage anything from the toxic waste dump that used to be one of my conduits." Harper rushed off.

Dylan and Tyr stared one another down. Tyr's look of near contempt evolved into amused contempt. Dylan finally said, "I was his first choice."

"Yet you only realized that now. How sad for you."

Tyr, who'd been chafing under Dylan's command and openly rebelling in several ways lately, no doubt had intentions of suborning Dylan's engineer to help himself. Harper deserved better.

"You're only doing this to score points against me."

"While that's a welcome side effect, I have more reasons than that to seek Harper's company. If you'd been paying attention, you would know that. Besides, I never do anything that reaps only one benefit." Tyr leaned in close, as if to share a confidence. "He waited for you far longer and with more patience than I expected. It's a shame you have a habit of squandering resources foolishly." Then Tyr walked away as Dylan stewed.

Dylan thought of stealing Harper back, but it seemed petty, especially with Tyr seeming to be honest when he said he enjoyed Harper's company and Harper looking so happy where he was. He would be intervening to make himself happy, and that wasn't fair to Harper.

He would not imagine what they did together or wonder if it was anything like sex with Rhade. He wouldn't.

He was imagining.

  


* * *

"What happened?" Dylan asked as he entered med-bay. Harper had seemed fine on The Resolution of Hector....

"Nothing, boss," Harper said from his seat on an examination table. "Trance just wanted to play doctor, and who could blame her?"

Trance directed a fondly exasperated look at Harper, then answered, "I noticed that Harper held his head up in an unusual, cautious way. He has some swelling and light bruising on his neck and under his chin. Nothing broken, jammed, or slipped from proper alignment, though."

Dylan hadn't realized. Harper covered very well.... Could he afford to ever let Harper leave the Andromeda? Life seemed to have it in for him.

Harper shrugged, then winced. "Remiel didn't have any training in proper Harper handling. He seemed to think that my neck makes a nice handle." His darting eyes suggested painful secrets held. It reminded Dylan of something he'd seen before.

"Remiel?" Dylan asked.

"What the Balance named his new avatar. Guy had no sense of humor. Didn't like being called a dickless wonder either, but, heh, who does?"

Of course the Balance had abused Harper. How else could it have gotten an android avatar so quickly? "Why didn't you go get yourself looked at?"

"It's not like I'm delicate. I could take care of it myself."

"There's no reason for you to stay in pain," Trance said.

"It's nothing. Jeez."

Then Dylan remembered it. One of the cadets in his first command had shown the same kind of eye movement and secrecy. Had a tendency to be clumsy if you could believe his explanations for his high injury rate. It turned out that he'd been facing harassment from three other cadets but kept it quiet and hadn't appreciated it when Dylan had intervened as their CO.

The Balance of Judgement had controlled Rommie for a while. Perhaps the abuse had started before Remiel's creation. Getting checked out in med-bay would put Harper's injuries in Andromeda's records, and Rommie would find out.

Harper loved her dearly. It must have been horrible for him when she turned on him, even if the Balance had been the one piloting her body.

"You know," Harper said, "we're lucky that the Balance may have a brain a trillion times faster than mine, but I'm a trillion times sneakier than he is. He could have screwed us over so much worse than he did."

It may have been a blatant change of subject, but it hooked Dylan's curiosity. "How so?"

"Hector. While Trance has been moving my head around, I've been looking over everything. Hector was based off the Achilles template but also off of memories from Andromeda's archives. Those memories are Rommie's. The Balance could have put traces of himself in there. In fact, he might have tried to influence the decision to make Hector an Achilles knock-off knowing that you'd have an emotional reaction to that face and voice. Then the Resolution gets stolen, and Hector says that Andromeda might have been compromised as well as Rommie and you should hand control of the Andromeda Ascendant to him? Then one Restorian ship survives, perhaps for the famously lone cowboy Captain Hunt to ride over on it with no backup except Hector to the Resolution? Think about it. If Hector had been corrupted, the Unbalanced could have had The Resolution of Hector and the Andromeda Ascendant under his control while you walked yourself right into his personal clutches on your ownsome, with no one to protect you."

Shit. "I'm glad you're not an evil AI. You do enough damage at human speed."

Harper grinned. "Thanks."

While Harper was in a particularly analytical mood.... "Has Tyr mentioned anything to you lately about potential Kodiak survivors?"

Harper raised an eyebrow and looked amused. "That was really random. Or maybe not. Tyr said something to you?"

"He didn't to you?"

"That doesn't mean anything. It's not like we spill our guts to each other daily."

Maybe it was nothing. "I see." Dylan _did not_ understand what Harper and Tyr had together. He also tried not to imagine it, though he had seen Tyr publicly set his hand so tenderly on the side of Harper's face....

Then again, he'd thought that Rhade hadn't kept any important secrets from him, so maybe the difference was that Harper and Tyr were honest about holding information back.

"Not that I'm saying you should trust him on that." Harper grinned at his reaction. "Oh, get that look off your face. Yeah, we got a thing, but mutual self-interest is a part of our thing, and he's been getting weirder and quieter since somebody unknown sent him that damned Dragonia vine and every Nietzschean and his Uber brother has been making him offers about him joining them."

So Tyr had either lied to him or declined to keep Harper updated on the origin of the Dragonia vine. Either way, it looked suspicious. "Thanks."

Harper's expression turned hard. "A united Nietzschean people isn't in anyone's self-interest but theirs. Tyr's cool on his own, but Ubers tend to be worse when you put 'em with other Ubers. I haven't forgotten that."

Dylan might not see it quite like that, but he hadn't forgotten either. "Trance, take care of Harper."

"I'm not that breakable!" Harper protested.

"But Remiel tried."

  


* * *

As he approached Engineering, Dylan could hear Harper before he saw him. "C'mon, chop chop!" Harper shouted. "There's work to do! What's wrong with everybody?"

"The Commonwealth is dead," one of Harper's engineers said quietly.

"It might not be. Sure, a lot of the fleet got demolished, but the Commonwealth is more than a fleet. And the Nietzscheans abandoned it, but they suck anyway."

It made Dylan feel warm to hear it.

"What about Sinti being overrun and five planets destroyed? What about other member worlds deserting?"

Harper sighed. "There's only been a Commonwealth for one year. You lived the rest of your lives without it. You can do it again if you have to."

Dylan felt less warm about that.

One of the engineers noticed him and shouted, "Captain!" They all snapped to attention.

Except for Harper, of course. "Hey, boss." He looked tired, as befitted someone who'd been working in some capacity or another straight through 13 hours.

"You're going on break." Dylan took him by the arm and started to pull him away.

"I got repairs--"

"You have a crew to take care of that and good Scotch calling your name."

Harper brightened. "Where do you keep getting this stuff? Tell me you're the Scotch fairy."

"I'm the Scotch fairy." Dylan didn't care that he had the entire on-duty engineering department gaping at him.

"Thank you for your honesty. It's been in short supply lately. Carry on, everybody."

As Tyr's lover and the Andromeda's chief engineer, Harper must have been seriously hurt by Tyr's betrayal and the major means by which it had been accomplished. Having known Rhade's betrayal as well as Tyr's, Dylan knew how Harper had to be feeling right now and decided that he could use some personal attention. No one had found the Andromeda yet, but someone would eventually. Still, they couldn't stay on red alert full-time. They were all taking command shifts. Beka was on now.

Once they reached Dylan's office, Dylan sat Harper down and poured out a glass. Harper cupped it with his hands and said, "Yeah, today's definitely a Scotch day."

They drank together in silence for a long while until Harper said, "I knew he would betray us sooner or later, ya know? I mean, he's a Nietzschean and he's Tyr. I thought I was so smart. Then he blindsided me with the where, when, and how. Got me good."

"You almost sound proud of him."

"Dylan, I didn't find that sabotage even when I had to rebuild the Andromeda after the Magog blew the shit out of us. He did some job. He got it past _me_." Harper shook his head. "Yeah, got me good...."

"Aren't you angry?"

"Fuck yeah! I have no idea if he meant anything he said.... You know, after he fixed his sabotage, he said that I made him laugh. In a good way. Like it wasn't anything personal. Bastard has style. Even when he's betraying you, you can't help but admire the damned style." Harper put his hand at the back of his neck and rubbed. "And I knew what he was. It's like the story of the lady and the snake. A snake always bites, and the lady knew it was a snake when she took it in. And it's his son. Nothing trumps a Nietzschean's family."

"So you're bitter at least?"

"I wish," Harper said as he shook his head and smiled ruefully. "I still can't be all that angry at him, and most of what anger I have is from him fucking with Engineering to get his job done."

Dylan hadn't expected Rhade's betrayal at all, but Nietzscheans had been different then. It gave him the benefit of no one being able to do an "I told you so." Then again, his trust of Rhade had led to the collapse of civilization the first time. At least Harper didn't have to feel personally responsible for the second collapse. No, that responsibility was partly Dylan's.

"Dylan, things look dark, but this has happened before. The Long Night isn't so far back that people don't know how to survive. And that's us too. We're survivors. You're a survivor, and you have us as your guides to what a Night can be like. If you wanna rebuild again, you can. Or not, since the new Commonwealth seemed to be best at getting in our way and pissing us off. You started with nothing but yourself and your ship and created a star-spanning government in two years. We'll get through."

Surprised, Dylan asked, "Are _you_ comforting _me_?"

Harper smiled. "I dunno. Am I?"

Harper's faith made Dylan feel a little better. "Yes."

"Then yeah."

"Thanks."

Harper was a good soul, despite his occasional ruthlessness, and a complicated one. Dylan forgot that last bit sometimes.

"No problem." Harper looked down at his glass. "You know, I don't even remember what I did to get that public lewdness charge."

"Now you'll tell me?"

"Hey, you wanted to know. Accept the timing like a good little captain."

"'Little'?"

"You know what I mean."

"Fine, fine."

"Ahem. Like I said, I don't even remember what I did to get that public lewdness charge. One moment I was boozing it up with Izzy, next I was in lock-up wearing nothing but a feathered mask, a scratchy police-issued blanket, and a blue ribbon tied around my dick, just like in that story about the girls wanting to see what a Scotsman wore under his kilt. 'Don't know where ye've been, laddy, but ye won first prize' or something."

God. "Did anyone--"

"Take advantage? Didn't feel like it. I felt okay. Nobody molested me or anything that I could tell." Harper snorted. "Beka didn't post bail for me for two days she was so pissed, though she had me checked out by a doctor later."

Dylan was horrified. "She _left_ you there?"

"I wasn't in general pop. I had my own cell, even if it was the size of a coffin, so it wasn't like anybody was gonna make me his bitch. With all that time alone and mostly naked, I gave my behavior _a lot_ of thought." Harper smiled a little. "Besides, I was allergic to something on that mask and had a rash across my face for a week to come. I learned my lesson. Wanted to murder Izzy, though."

Dylan smiled. "Did you get him back?" This should be good.

"Actually, no. Despite its name, the ship he worked on, the Shamrock, had shit luck. Ran deeper into the red than we ever did, so the captain cut corners a lot. One run, the AP tanks blew." Harper shook his head. "Wasn't even anything left to salvage. Lost my mad-on when I heard, let me tell you."

Damn. Dylan sighed. "The Long Night."

"You think even your Commonwealth didn't have poor people or bad luck? Nah, that stuff's always happening somewhere. We just survive and live the best we can." Harper lifted his glass. "To surviving to fight another day."

"To surviving." When Dylan gently set his glass next to Harper's, he let their fingers touch, and it was electric. Harper smiled a little, softly. Maybe things could be salvaged. Dylan said, "To the future."

Harper's eyes glinted at him as they clinked glasses, but Harper's eyes almost always glinted. Still, he said, "I'm open to that."

 

### END


End file.
